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After that date we cannot hope to find any certain evidence of connection, for by that time the Mycenaean civilization had probably come to an end. In the days of the XIIth and XVIIIth Dynasties a great and splendid power evidently existed in Crete, and sent its peaceful ambassadors, the Keftiu who are represented in the Theban tombs, to Egypt.
Say ce has held to contain the names of "Caphtor and Casluhim" and to prove the knowledge of the latter name in the fourteenth century before Christ. We see generally from the Ptolemaic inscriptions that nobody could read them but a few priests, who often made mistakes. One of the most serious was the identification of Keftiu with Phoenicia in the Stele of Canopus.
In Ptolemaic times the word 'Keftiu' was unquestionably applied to the Phnicians, who had for long been the great seafarers and carriers of the Mediterranean; and till recent years it was generally believed that the Keftiu of the Eighteenth Dynasty were Phnicians also, though their faces, as depicted on the Egyptian wall-paintings, did not bear the slightest trace of Semitic cast.
There remain the Pulosathu, who are, almost beyond question, the Philistines, so well known to us from their connection with the rise of the Hebrew monarchy. The Hebrew tradition brought the Philistines from Kaphtor, and Kaphtor is plainly nothing else than the Egyptian Kefti, or Keftiu. In the Philistines, then, we have the last organized remnant of the old Minoan sea-power.
For our culture-ancestors are neither the Egyptians, nor the Assyrians, nor the Hebrews, but the Hellenes, and they, the Aryan-Greeks, derived most of their civilization from the pre-Hellenic people whom they found in the land before them, the Pelasgi or "Mycenæan" Greeks, "Minoans," as we now call them, the Keftiu of the Egyptians.
In the representations of the Keftiu, on the walls of Rekh-ma-ra's tomb, the shoes are white, and have bindings of red and blue, and in some cases are delicately embroidered. Such examples as the shoe on an ivory figure found at Knossos, and the terra-cotta model of a shoe found at Sitia, show the daintiness with which the Minoans indulged themselves in the matter of footwear.
The representations of the last-named people have become of the very highest interest during the last few years, on account of the discoveries in Crete, which have revealed to us the state and civilization of these very Keftiu. Messrs.
But the discoveries of the last few years have demolished that idea for ever, along with many other beliefs as to the influence of the overrated Phnicians upon the culture of the Mediterranean area, and the pictures of the Minoans of Knossos have made it certain that the Keftiu of the Eighteenth Dynasty were none others than the ambassadors, sailors, and merchants of the Sea-Kings of Crete.
Eor it is due to them that the voice of the doubter has finally ceased to be heard, and that now no archaeologist questions that the Egyptians were in direct communication with the Cretan Mycenæans in the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, some fifteen hundred years before Christ, for no one doubts that the pictures of the Keftiu are pictures of Mycenaeans.
Over the seas, the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty were setting down on their tomb walls those likenesses of the Keftiu which have helped us to the date of this last development of Minoan greatness.
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